Candy Crush Friends Saga is out now, wants to hook you all over again

The new sequel to Candy Crush Saga has 3D characters that actually play an active role in your candy crushing.

In real life time, it was six years ago that Candy Crush Saga first launched and grew into a phenomenon. In mobile games time, that’s an eternity, and it’s kind of amazing that the original game still is consistently among the top 10 revenue generating apps. Still, King knew it needed a proper follow-up at some point, and it’s arrived this week in the form of Candy Crush Friends Saga.

As its title suggests, Candy Crush Friends Saga doesn’t deviate all that far from a winning formula. Its 300-plus levels still challenge mobile gamers to use their match-3 skills to do things like freeing octopi, finding animals and spreading jam, all of which get progressively harder as you go.

The big difference this time around is the Friends: 3D characters who aid when the going gets tough with special abilities unique to each of them. Once you unlock a few, you can pick between them before starting a level, giving you the best possible chance to clear it in the limited number of matches you are allowed.

Naturally, there are a number of different power-ups and special candies that can be formed by making different kinds of matches, so there’s a lot going on in Candy Crush Friends Saga besides the spruced up graphics and sound, though those things are sure to catch your eye as well. King is more than a little excited about the prospects of people eating up this sequel, bad pun fully intended.

“We are very excited to officially launch Candy Crush Friends Saga – our sweetest game yet!” Sebastian Knutsson, Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer at King, said in a press release. “We’re still so surprised and humbled by the success of the Candy Crush franchise. With each iteration, our teams work hard to innovate so that we can offer players a fresh new gaming experience. With Candy Crush Friends Saga, we wanted to immerse players in the game like never before and we feel that bringing the characters and their world to life in 3D will do just that. We hope people enjoy playing the game as much as we did making it!”

Best of all, if this is something you want to check out, the game is already live for iOS and Android, and is free to download. We can’t guarantee it will be your new obsession, but if history is any indication, there’s definitely a chance you’re going to get hooked. Again.